Yes, so it would seem after taking a quick poke around at X-box scene and xboxhacker. It does appear to be genuine.

"It looks like people on xbox-scene.com and xboxhacker.net managed to run Xbox-Linux on a non-modded Xbox console. It requires no soldering at all - you don't even have to open up the Xbox. They are using an exploit in the saved game handling of the EA xbox game '007 Agent Under Fire'. It requires the original version of the 007 game and a memorycard you can connect to PC like the mega-X-key or datel's action replay. Apparently you can even build this memorycard yourself using a standard USB memstick." Frankly it seems like just soldering in the modchip would be easy, but big points for being clever!

note: At this moment , this method can ONLY be used to run xbox linux live. Maybe later it will be possible to use it to run homebrew utils. So for now you'll all still need modchips. We'll keep you updated ofcourse :)